Installation view: Home/Ground, 2004 In Kazuo Ishiguro's novel When We Were Orphans the central character Christopher Banks (nicknamed Puffin) remembers a childhood conversation that ensued with a close family friend about growing up an English ex-pat in Shanghai:
‘Well, it's true, out here, you're growing up with a lot of different sorts around you. Chinese, French, Germans, Americans, what have you. It'd be no wonder if you grew up a bit of a mongrel.' He gave a short laugh. Then he went on: 'But that's no bad thing. You know what I think, Puffin? I think it would be no bad thing if boys like you all grew up with a bit of everything. We might all treat each other a good deal better then. Be less of these wars for one thing. Oh yes. Perhaps one day, all these conflicts will end, and it won't be because of great statesmen, or churches or organizations like this one. It'll be because people have changed. They'll be like you, Puffin. More a mixture. So why not become a mongrel? It's healthy'.1
Using the backdrop of early twentieth century Hong Kong, Ishiguro posits the contemporary questions and social musings of hybridity: interculturalism and co-existence. ‘Growing up with different sorts’ also holds within the political and religious aspirations of greater inter-communication, formed from a closer world with lesser conflict. Herein originate the positive hopes and possibilities that the hybrid (mongrel) as a daily and theoretical tool encompasses. Whereby people through a greater intimacy with/of cross-cultural ties, acquire a more sympathetic, educated understanding of difference, and its signification. So why not become a hybrid? It’s healthy!
My early childhood was spent in Kuantan, Malaysia, returning to Australia annually for Christmas with my mothers’ family. In the eighties my parents moved to Melbourne and I was enrolled in the local primary school where I spent six months of the year, followed by six months tuition in Kuantan until I was eleven. It is an essential childhood desire to be able to place ‘home’, “the close association between ideas of ‘home’ and ‘identity’ is not new, nor is it unique…”,2 and as such growing up in-between countries I constantly searched for a homeland in which to position myself. ‘There’s no place like home’, cries Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, and yet I was never sure which place deserved my absolute recognition of homeland. When in Melbourne I ached for the humidity and warm seas of Kuantan; and while in Kuantan, I reminisced for the distinct scent of wattle in the breeze and the warble of magpies in Melbourne. Learning to differentiate between these cultural situations and perspectives, so drastically different in the two places I wanted to call home proved a doubled intricacy, alternating between enrichment and bewilderment.
1 Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans, Faber and Faber, London, 2000, p. 76.
2 Devleena Ghosh, ‘Home Away From Home: The Indo-Fijian Community in Sydney’, in Alter/Asians: Asian-Australian identities in art, media and popular culture, Ien Ang, Sharon Chalmers, Lisa Law, Mandy Thomas (eds.), Pluto Press, Sydney, 2000, p. 69.
Untitled 2004 My art practice is concerned with the intersections of cultures. It examines inherent similarities and socio-cultural disparities through literary and visual histories of sexual representation, and the languages of intimacy. My installations are formed between paper cut-outs and their shadows. This visual interdependency challenges binary schema, whilst the shadow proposes a synthesis, a site of transformation. The approach of this visual methodology, I hope, provides a way into discussing and provoking the flux of post-modern cultural critiques on identity and body politics. In Bernard Schlink’s collection of short stories, Flights of Love, intimate descriptions similarly evoke the borders of culture, society and sex, and their mutual searches and dilemmas towards greater Unity. When he writes; “We come from two different cultures, we speak two different languages, even when you’re good at translating from yours into mine, we live in two different worlds – if we ever stop talking to each other, we’ll drift apart.”1I directly identify with my own heritage - My intimate places within the politics of multi-multiculturalism, and the trials and tribulations of families that inhabit two or more cultures formed from inter-ethnic marriages. These are all intimate spaces that encompass difference, are paradoxical and sacred, and at the same time “these men and women on the borders… represent the pulse of the modern world.”2
1 Bernhard Schlink, Flights of Love, Phoenix, London, 2002, p. 211.
2 Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt- The Powers and Limits and Psychoanalysis, p. 244.
Untitled 2004
Untitled 2004 For the project Home/Ground, I plan to continue with the evocations of the intimate relationship, and examine the cross-cultural ties that come from mixed relationships, and which provoke the Hybrid Bodies of today. With the title, Why can’t we be friends now? said the other… this project of couples and singles will represent the many bodies of immigration, of interlopers and lovers, and of the hybrid bodies that are the product of such unions – similar cross-breeds, half-castes, to my own Australian-Malaysian hybrid body. The bodies’ will present as visual maps to the Home/Grounds that these people have come from, or as maps which place inheritance, either as ethnic scars, familial traces, or cultural tattoo. For, the mapping and naming of Home present as strong, even inescapable referents within contemporary debates on culture and identity. An iconic interloper, himself, and who constantly questioned his own Home/Ground, and place between India and England, Rudyard Kipling wrote; “in the sky there is no east nor west. We make these distinctions in the mind, then we believe them to be true.”1 With heads as globes, presenting as the sky and cosmos within which our world and its mappings sit, this installation of bodies will provoke the relevance and or correctness of constantly needing or having to state local place. Questioning thorough the restitution and resurrection of intimacy and private desires the wider public demands on identity and its resultant debates. The installation of bodies mapped with countries with abstract, characterless heads that point to the wider, unspoken, and imagined boundary’s s of home and ground, will hopefully act as a provocation to the necessity of such dialogue and the restrictions it posits on contemporary notions of hybridity.
1 Ali Nobil ‘Is East… East’, Third Text, 49, Winter 1999-2000, p. 107 (Quoting Rudyard Kipling)
1 Ali Nobil ‘Is East… East’, Third Text, 49, Winter 1999-2000, p. 107 (Quoting Rudyard Kipling)
Untitled 2004 
